Why are you modifying the tree? That sounds rather suspect to me. Plus, I'll bet that if you benchmark it, the cost of cloning is going to be about 80-90% of the cost of parsing. Try it out. If that's all it is, then I'd suggest not worrying about it.
My criteria for good software:
Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?